


Seamstress

by zopyrus



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Embroidery, Gen, Historiography, Linguistics Feuds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-01
Updated: 2014-04-01
Packaged: 2018-01-17 20:55:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1402135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zopyrus/pseuds/zopyrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They won’t meet until the end of the world, but Maglor and Míriel manage to swap stories anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seamstress

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Suzelle for the beta!
> 
> B2MeM Prompt: "He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams." (Fellowship of the Ring, "The Shadow of the Past")

Maglor was very young when his father first put an arched Telerin harp into his hands. He loved it before he played a note, for it was the most perfect object he had ever seen.

The body of the harp curved like boat, with a sharp, pointed prow; and when Maglor’s father tightened the thirteen silken strings, he seemed to be raising a sail.

After such a beautiful beginning, Maglor’s first lesson was a disappointment. It was hard for him to remember the names of the notes, let alone a whole song; and he hurt his fingers when he tried to pluck the strings with the force his father demanded.

“You will get used to it,” said Fëanor. His voice was as tense as wound silk. “There is no point in my teaching you, if you are not going to do it right.”

Maglor did his best to please his father. After a few weeks of careful practicing, his fingertips stopped aching, and the names of the notes began to come as easily as the alphabet.

Soon he was able to play songs all the way through, with no mistakes.

Fëanor was pleased that he had been the first to recognize his son’s gift, which would have come to nothing if he had not insisted on perfection and hard work from the very beginning. Maglor’s music gave him joy for another reason, too.

“Your talent comes from your grandmother,” he said; and from his tone, Maglor knew his father didn’t mean Istarnië, mother of Nerdanel.

“She had nimble fingers, just like you, and a quick tongue. Did I ever tell you the story of how she invented the metal needle?”

Maglor shook his head, and cradled the harp in his lap while his father’s voice wove its spell: not in sung poetry, but in prose so beautiful that images rose, unbidden, before Maglor’s eyes.

After that, Maglor thought often about his grandmother Míriel. He daydreamed about her when he was practicing his scales. Míriel had worked with silk, too, although it had been to a different purpose. One afternoon, before he quite knew what he was doing, his fingers began to pick out a melody he had never heard before. He made a song about a silver-haired woman, with a slash of silver shining between her fingers.

When he sang the song to their family, Fëanor wept, and called him a true son.

~~~

Míriel’s name, once rare and revered, became common in their house. When Maglor was a little older, Fëanor brought out one of the tapestries his mother had embroidered. She had been a loremaster, as well as an embroideress; and she had combined both her arts into record keeping long before her friend Rúmil created the art of writing with alphabets.

“Our people have long memories,” Fëanor told his son. “We flatter ourselves that those memories are perfect: that nothing is misremembered, or forgotten. But my mother knew better.”

The cloth unrolled in Fëanor’s hands like a scroll.

“What do you see here?”

Míriel had embroidered the same image, over and over. There were stars, and tall dark trees, and a glimmering lake—and little people on the grass.

“It’s Cuiviénen,” Maglor said, recognizing it instantly.

“Tell me more,” Fëanor pressed.

Maglor studied the images carefully before he spoke again. If this was a test, as his conversations with his father often were, he was determined to pass.

He pointed to the first panel.

“This one is the Awakening. I see Imin, Tata, and Enel, standing in the foreground—and Iminyë, Tatië, and Enelyë, sleeping beside them.”

“Yes,” said his father. “And how many sleepers do you see in the background?”

Míriel had stitched too many figures to count—all of them in little pairs, wives lying beside their husbands—but Maglor knew the story well enough to do some quick math in his head.

“One hundred thirty-eight,” he said, glancing sidelong at his father.

Fëanor smirked approvingly.

“What about the second panel?”

It looked like a copy of the first—almost.

“It’s the same scene,” said Maglor. “Except that Imin and Enel have gone back to sleep, and Tatië is standing with her husband. And some of the people in the background are waking up, too.”

“Almost right,” said Fëanor. “But it’s not a continuation—it’s a different version. Look again.”

In the third panel, all six foreground figures slept; behind them, a dark-haired woman woke, alone. She had no husband; and as Maglor looked closer he saw that although the sleeping figures were still clustered in groups, almost none of them were part of a pair.

In the fourth panel, there were only twelve elves; in the fifth, there seemed to be thousands. In the sixth, some slept in a desert, not a forest.

“Middle-earth was a dangerous place,” said Fëanor. “Most of the Unbegotten elves perished, long before our people heard the horns of Oromë. And not all of those who remained consented to the Great Journey, or survived it.”

Maglor nodded. It was familiar history, preserved in epic poetry, nursery rhymes, and everything in between.

“Míriel Þerindë was not satisfied with the tales she was told as a child. Before she settled in Tirion with my father, she travelled in search of people who could tell her more about our history. At first she believed that, through her research, she might arrive at the truth.

“But even when she spoke directly with the Unbegotten, and not merely with people who claimed to have known them, my mother learned very different stories. People had forgotten—or, in some cases, perhaps they even lied. But she could not discover which stories were false, and which true.”

“Couldn’t she ask the Valar?” asked Maglor.

His father laughed, a little unkindly.

“They were not there, any more than you were.”

“But what about the Song?”

“You know many songs, Kanafinwë. You sing them as they were meant to be sung, with the most beautiful voice I have ever heard: but does that mean you understand the stories better than those who experienced them?”

Some of Maglor’s musician friends believed just that: but Maglor shook his head, chastened by the admonishment behind his father’s praise.

“The Valar cannot tell us our history,” said his father, firmly. “It is not theirs to tell, no matter how much they think they know.”

Fëanor unrolled the tapestry to the very end. The final edge was snarled with knots and dangling threads; there was even an ancient needle stuck haphazardly into the cloth of the last, incomplete scene.

“People claim my mother rarely finished her work,” said Fëanor. “They think it a failing: but much of what she made could never have been finished, even if she had lived. She was too ambitious to tame her ideas, or to claim she had found an answer when there was none.”

“She could not talk to everyone who was there,” said Maglor. “Is that why she didn’t finish it?”

“Yes,” said Fëanor. “But she began it so that people would better understand the truth. She didn’t want the stories she found to be forgotten, or changed again. She knew that if she didn’t set them down, they would be lost.”

“Why isn’t it on display?” asked Maglor. “If she wanted people to know—”

“Most people don’t care,” said his father, harshly. “They prefer finished art. They prefer the symmetry of the counting fable, where twelve times twelve elves awake next to their eternal soulmates—whether or not they really believe it.”

“I care,” said Maglor. “Art shouldn’t be simplified.”

“Neither should the truth,” said his father. “I am glad you understand that, despite your youth.”

~~~

Maglor’s songs became longer and more complicated. At last, his father refused to teach him any longer.

“We will still read lore together,” said Fëanor. “But you must study performance and music theory with Rúmil the Sage. He understands music as I do not; and you should ask him to teach you sarati, too. If you are going to be a poet, you ought to be able to read our earliest histories for yourself: and they have not all been copied over.”

Fëanor was right, as usual. With Rúmil for his critic, Maglor’s composition skills improved in leaps and bounds; and the singing exercises Rúmil assigned him helped his diction, too. Reluctantly, Maglor set aside his small arched harp to learn about its musical cousins: the Vanyarin pedal harp, and the Noldorin hook harp.

“Those are only the new names, of course,” said Rúmil, with undisguised disapproval. “The hook harp and the arched harp were invented long before we came to Aman, and divided ourselves up. Plenty of people play all three; and the pedal harp is only for formal occasions, since it is very hard to travel with.”

When they were not playing music, they spoke much of lore: linguistics and history, mostly. When Maglor asked to learn sarati, Rúmil didn’t restrict them to working with his old, obsolete alphabet. He also taught Maglor a newer, different system to preserve his melodies in writing, so that even someone who had never heard them would know what notes to sing.

“I expect your father will come up with a superior method eventually,” he said, affectionately. “But until then, my neumes will serve you well enough.”

To Maglor’s surprise, such jests were frequent, and they did not seem to be self-deprecating. Rúmil was clearly fond, not jealous, of Fëanor.

“Why should I not be fond of your father?” he asked Maglor, once. “He was my student, and understood my work as few ever have. Otherwise he would never have been able to better it. Moreover, I was friends with Míriel Serindë of old, and rejoice to see her child succeed so brilliantly. Your father’s triumphs are hers, too.”

It was a heart-warming speech, and kindly meant: but Maglor frowned in confusion.

“Her name was not Serindë.”

Loyalty made him pronounce the sibilant the way his father always did: as though it were about to bite and poison someone.

“I move with the times,” said Rúmil, unfazed. “Just as I do not mind writing with your father’s newfangled alphabet, I accept that pronunciation will change with the centuries. Your grandmother disagreed with me on that point, but if she could not sway me, you certainly will not.”

“My father freely admits she was stubborn,” protested Maglor. “But she did not resist change to our language out of stubbornness alone, but in remembrance of the friends and kin she left behind in Middle-earth. She foresaw a day when, even if we reunited with them, our changed way of speaking would make us strangers—perhaps even enemies.”

“And you?” asked Rúmil. “Do you, too, dream of reunion with long-lost kin?”

“Yes,” said Maglor, vehemently—although in truth, he had not given it much thought until now.

“Then it is well you are a poet,” said Rúmil. “The difference of a few consonants will not stop you. Your songs will move strangers to tears.”

“I don’t want to make strangers cry,” said Maglor. “I want them to understand me.”

“Just like your grandmother,” said Rúmil. “Arguing with a compliment!”

~~~

Míriel trimmed the dangling threads from her latest tapestry and stepped back to study her work. Vairë’s dyes came in every hue imaginable, but Míriel still refused all but the shades that had been available to her in life. Madder and sappenwood, woad and nettle: that was enough to make the sun red and the sea blue. Anything more would be magic, not art.

“These stories are about my family, not yours,” she reminded Vairë, who favored dyes that glistened with wetness, or glowed with their own light. “Why shouldn’t I tell them in my own way?”

It was a rhetorical question, for, Valië though she was, Vairë rarely questioned her artistic choices. Indeed, Míriel sometimes missed her elvish rivals in Tirion. They had been fools, praising her worst work and ignoring her best innovations; but even their wrongheaded criticisms had spurred her on to greater heights. It was hard to make art alone.

“You will find that out soon,” Míriel whispered to the crouching figure at the bottom of her tapestry. He plucked the strings of his little harp, despite the blisters on his hands. For better or worse, he had never let pain keep him from his work.

Once, Míriel had harbored hopes of meeting her grandson. He would visit her in Mandos, or perhaps they would both finally get around to going home. 

Now, a meeting seemed more unlikely than ever. But although the story of Maglor’s life seemed to be over, Míriel swore she would never stop putting him into her tapestries.

She hoped, too, that he would keep singing of her.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. If you are curious, the visual model for Maglor’s arched harp was [this gorgeous instrument](http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/502040).
> 
> 2\. There is a footnote in Shibboleth of Fëanor that claims none of Fëanor’s sons shared his interest in linguistics, “save Maglor who was a poet, and Curufin, his fourth and favourite son.” The same essay describes Míriel as a musician in all but name: “She had a beautiful voice and a delicate and clear enunciation, though she spoke swiftly and took pride in this skill.” (If she had lived, I’m sure Maglor would have written patter songs for her to sing.)


End file.
